She's not a trained linguist, but my wife still claims that multiple embedding is rare in Chinese, and many of the center-embedded sentences need to be rearranged to parataxis.
– Ron MaimonMar 24 '12 at 8:50

If it's true, maybe you can answer my question on Chinese embedding--- linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1598/… . Do you know how true it is in the 20th/19th/18th centuries? When did center embedding first appear approximately? Is it still going on, are the number of embedding constructions increasing? I wonder about this endlessly, and my wife lost patience with me on this a long time ago.
– Ron MaimonMar 26 '12 at 7:44

@Ron Maimon I will ask my friend who is majoring in ancient Chinese, maybe on this Saturday. :D
– sygMar 27 '12 at 16:13

3 Answers
3

Consider preposition stranding, which is possible in English but not in Mandarin:

the girlfriend I broke up with

*跟分手的女朋友

*gen fenshou de nvpengyou
with breakup DE girlfriend

A resumptive pronoun is obligatory in Mandarin but impossible in English:

*the girlfriend I broke up with her

跟她分手的女朋友

gen ta fenshou de nvpengyou
with her breakup DE girlfriend

There are several other cases such that extraction out of a constituent is grammatical in English but not in Mandarin. In other words, many phrases in Mandarin including 把+NP and the aforementioned prepositional phrases seem to be extraction islands.

EDIT: I can also think of a case of the converse (a Mandarin syntactic construction which cannot be rendered in English without some circumlocution).

thx for your answer! but the example of “跟她分手的女朋友” seems not to be a valid sentence for me (I'm a native Chinese). The possible translation of "the girlfriend I broke up with" is "已经跟我分手了的女朋友". In real life, I would actually say "已经分手了的女朋友". The "跟我" is quite superfluous.
– sygMar 24 '12 at 18:15

As jogloran pointed out, preposition stranding (and how you can't do it in Chinese) is a good source of these. Here are several examples of relative clauses where the object of a preposition is being pulled out. Note that the Chinese grammar doesn't match the English (because the obvious way to do it is ungrammatical):